


The Mirror

by lunanimal



Category: In the Flesh (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-03 20:24:38
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21185483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lunanimal/pseuds/lunanimal
Summary: A little vignette of Kieren struggling to paint a self-portrait, and a moment between him and his mum.





	The Mirror

Kieren feels nothing as he forces himself to meet the gaze of the monster in the mirror.  
  
He’s never done a self-portrait before, not like this. He’s painted himself with his family, from photographs, but never with a mirror. And never… as he is now.  
  
He kneels on the hard floor of his room with his mini-easel and paint supplies strewn around him. It should be uncomfortable, but this strange body never gets sore, and is always stiff, so it seems as good a workspace as any. He’s nicked a small standing mirror from Jem’s room; he angles it to catch the light.  
  
Since Amy’s funeral, it’s become a sort of compulsion. Seeing himself au naturale in the mirror. She loved his face, thought it was moregeous, so he’ll have to love it too, god damn it, or else what sort of a friend is he?  
  
He tries not to feel relieved as he drops his eyes down onto his paints. Automatically, he reaches for red and brown, for the underpainting, before reconsidering. There is no red or brown in his complexion, no warmth of blood. He has the same complexion as Amy, he tells himself, and as Simon. Simon! Now there’s a mug he wouldn’t mind painting. But he doesn’t have any photos, and he loses his voice whenever he tries to ask Simon to sit for him.  
  
Kieren mixes a cool gray on his palette. Grey like cement.  
  
The others moan about what they’d give for just the smell of fresh coffee. For Kieren, it’s the smell of his paints. It was powerful. It would draw a curtain around him, shielding him from the rest of the world. He trusts it is still there, even if he can’t smell it, but it doesn’t work the same magic.  
  
He drags a thin brush through the grey pool, and raises it to the canvas.  
  
He glances into the mirror, studies the shape of his forehead, the lines of his cheekbones, his jaw. These haven’t changed. These are easy. He makes confident strokes across the canvas, until he has the shapes blocked out. And the shapes still look like him.  
  
It’s when he gets to the colors, and the details, and the eyes, _fuck, _that his hand starts to shake. He needs a finer brush, to get the ragged shape of his pupils. He drops his brush, but he cannot pick up another. He shuts his eyes.  
  
With his eyes closed, the house silent, his senses dulled, it is as though he doesn’t exist at all.  
  
Something rears in him. He does exist, that’s the thing, however he might feel about it, he’s real and he’s here. That void- that shame- has taken so much from him. He won’t let it take his art.  
  
He lifts his head and glares into the mirror. He can’t paint and judge at the same time. Has he ever faulted a smile for being asymmetrical, a nose for being large, a tuft of hair for laying at an odd angle? Why should this be different?  
  
He clenches his jaw, and what he sees in the mirror is no longer his face, or even a face at all, but lines, and shadows, and textures. He paints what he sees.  
  
*****  
  
It doesn’t become his face again until he’s finished. He sets it all down and shifts his weight back, crossing his legs. It isn’t perfect- none of his paintings ever are. There’s a tension in his eyebrows and around his eyes, his mouth neutral. It’s a kind of fuck-you expression. Jem would like it, he thinks, and he smiles.  
  
A quick knock and the door opens behind him.  
  
Instinctively, Kieren scrambles to shove the painting under his bed, as though it were a note from Rick, something private and forbidden. But he remembers the fresh paint in time to stop himself.  
  
“Oh, I’ve interrupted,” his mother says lightly, with a wave of her hand. “For dinner, you don’t mind if there’s olives in the pasta, do you?”  
  
“I’ll just pick them out,” he says. Yesterday, he would have told her off. Now, he cowers, and pretends to be what she imagines he is.  
  
His mum looks down at the mess of paint supplies and her breath catches.  
  
Kieren’s panic cannot take root in a pounding heart or sweating palms. It swirls through him.  
  
“Look at you, painting in your room again.” Her voice is choked, but she smiles, and blinks back the tears.  
  
He wonders how often they’ll have to replay this moment. When she remembers the years he was gone, and feels the loss all over again, and he doesn’t know how to console her. “_Been_ painting, Mum,” he mumbles.  
  
“Yes, I know.” She shakes her head and rolls her eyes. She pretends she is just being silly. Ignore her. “Can I see? I know you don’t like us to see till you’re finished.”  
  
He realizes he’s been crouching over the easel and leans back. “It’s finished.”  
  
His mum climbs down onto the floor next to him. He looks at her look at the painting. It’s strange, how when she sits on the floor like this, legs tucked under her, she seems to be so much realer a person. It occurs to Kieren to wonder at how much she pretends for him, as he pretends for her.  
  
“Goodness…” She looks nervously at him and back at the canvas. “Striking, isn’t it?”  
  
He stares at his hands, stained grey and yellow with paint. It blends in with his skin.  
  
She keeps looking at it, really looking. She reaches over and takes one of Kieren’s hands in hers. “Where can we put this one up, then?”


End file.
